SVRPaul's Blog: The Future of Real Estate

It was during our daily evening ritual of spending time with our daughter and visiting Lagendorf park that we met a super nice couple who had a daughter similar in age to ours. They had relocated from the City of Chicago to Barrington for pretty much the same reasons we did and had purchased a vintage home in the historical district of Barrington.

We mentioned that a historical home that came up for sale in Barrington had originally attracted our attention to Barrington when we were looking to relocate to the North Shore of Chicago. It was a really great conversation about restoring vintage homes and some of the great architecture you can find in Barrington including the preservation districts restoration guidelines.

As the sun began to set and the park…

I'm going to assume that it's the multi-million dollar advertising budgets of certain third party websites that have created a completely new advertising business that is real estate related.

It's the push (in my opinion) for real estate consumers to search for homes online before searching for a real estate agent.

Like any special interest, advertise it enough and it becomes something that becomes a normal practice. Savvy third party real estate advertising sites know this and obviously are not going to advertise the best way to find real estate except to visit their site in which they can collect your information and resell it to real estate agents, refer it to real estate agents for a fee, or sell real estate advertising space based on a cost of how…

Realogy shareholders approve $9 Billion dollar buyout by Apolo Management.  For those of you not familiar with who Realogy is, it is a company that spinned off of Cendant just last August and is the leading franchisor of real estate companies that include the Franchises of CENTURY 21, Coldwell Banker, Coldwell Banker Commercial, ERA and Sotheby's International.  (Yes, technically all of these franchises are headquartered in Parsippany, New Jersey under one building.) 

My wife and I had the opportunity to visit this impressive office building in April of 2005 and it is quite an impressive operation.  While each office is Independently Owned and Operated, each office sends a portion of commissions to this office building.  (I wish I would have taken a…